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EDH Deck Time: Arixmethes

Weirdly enough (although obviously it doesn’t actually mean anything) I was designing a card for just this thing in a dream recently. I just don’t remember what it did. I do have a design of this on our Guild forums. Funnily enough, it was also a 12/12 with a casting cost of 2UG, but that’s pretty much the extent of the similarities. Well, that and it couldn’t attack early either. Mine required you control 20 lands. It also had a partner and it gained a +1/+1 counter any time any player revealed a land card from their library or put a land card into play from the library.

Aaanyhow…

Wow. What to do with this?

I sort of feel like we were just here with Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma. This has a very similar role as a Commander. We use this to ramp out seven-drops on turn five, or preferably turn four. However, now we can actually play Hornet Queen and a whole slew of blue creatures are now available to us. They don’t even have to be creatures. (Although, obviously, Arixmethes isn’t stricly better than Goreclaw. She can produce much more mana, if you are able to play several creatures in one turn.)

So, we should make a decision on the direction of the deck. So, here’s one: Storm. Not necessarily something that plays actual storm cards, (but we can do that as well), but just something that is looking to play a bunch of cards during one turn, often with the goal of activating Arixmethes fast.

However, since we can probably cast seven drops early, let’s look at possible choices:

Well, when I started with this list, I didn’t have high hopes for it. That’s changed. Now I can’t wait write the rest of this up.

Next, we need ramp for turn two, so we can play our Commander on turn three.

That’s 13 of those. Maybe a couple too many? Or not quite enough? I would rather play more cards that find a land to put into play on turn two, but that’s not happening with the card pool we have available to us.

Next, loads of cantrips and cheap card draw.

Adding the number of previously presented two drops, I think we have a fairly good chance of activating Arixmether quite quickly. So, in a sense, this is a weird Voltron deck.

Maybe protect it in some way?

Also, while were at it, some ways to empty the board.

Since Kiora had some common history with Arixmethes, let’s put her into the deck as well.

Some more card draw?

The latter two have a slight problem of costing four, which makes them fairly awkward with our Commander, but we can live with this.

Since we have so much ramp and so many cantrips, I don’t think we have to play my normal 40+ lands. This leaves us with room for ten-ish more spells. Preferably some protection from various things.

Finally, just a bunch of cards from this color combination I enjoy playing.

That should leave us room for 37 lands. That’s I would go for at least 25 sources for each color and as many untapped ones as possible. You can live with early blue coming in tapped, but you should be able to play a two mana ramp on turn two and Arixmethes on turn three pretty consistently, and play a bunch of cantrips after that in one turn. At least sometimes. You can’t actually get that many off.